Back to basics

I'm rediscovering the joys of letter-writing. Yep, that's right, not emails nor blogs nor Facebook. I mean real letters, and I have to say its liberating. Whilst the digital age has given us so much in terms of speed we have lost the nuances and beauty that only seem to come when putting a pen to paper. It's hard to explain, but there's more of a sense when writing that you're actually speaking to the other person. Like you can almost hear the other person's voice as you imagine them reading it.  There's also a more personal element in that the writing is created by your own hand, it has its own unique fingerprint to it that makes it from you and only you. Email's just don't cut it in that sense. They all come in a pretty much standardised font, and as a result are a little impersonal - purely informational, not soulful. The other day someone asked if St. Paul (I prefer to refer to him as the apostle Paul, since as believers in Christ we are all saints) were alive today, what method would he use to communicate with the churches? I'd like to think he'd still write letters. The things he wrote were so important, so foundational to the church that I'd say they would need to be on paper still. There's something so much more deliberate about everything you say when its in letter form and written with your own hand. It becomes set in stone, you know that as you are writing, and you write accordingly.

I listened recently to a rare interview with Morrisey (formerly of rock band The Smiths). He's a very intelligent man, and he predicted a time when people would begin to lose heart with the digital age, when they would realise the isolation caused in its attempt to bring the world together, when people's yearning for real human contact and social interaction would become so strong as to cause a rejection of, or a rebellion against the virtual world. I can sympathise with this totally. I work in IT, I'm with computers all day, that's my job. Yet a large part of me is longing to go do something with my hands, away from technology, to live a real life, a simple life. Technology has brought us so much freedom, but at the same time I think it enslaves us....